Learning; Knowing where to find it in your network

Image by Carwash.com

I have gone through a learning experience that almost confused me until I met open learning and come to a conclusion of what learning is to me.

I remember my first question on a history session at advanced level, I asked my teacher " you are saying the Buganda Kingdom was the biggest in East Africa but I remember one of the reasons Buganda collaborated with the British colonialist was fear of their enemy camp Bunyoro which was the biggest, so which is which" he replied well and I remember the answer but I had learned about collaboration  at ordinary level, we were not taught about that yet but I saw that relationship with what I already know.

When at higher learning I had a tendency of using everything I remember from kindergarten to high school in answering exams, I could answer something that I heard from friends conversation to a story I had from my teachers or in public transport if I see it useful at the moment. I had developed my learning network and I could navigate through it and come up with answers.

The experience was a bit different with other teachers who wanted me to answer exactly as in the reference books they provided, while I saw value in a form of making me a good reader but the system limited me to only what I was learning and not what I have been learning throughout, it did not make use of my entire learning experience and my network.

Recently I came up with open learning, the social learning and this has been the best learning experience I have ever had. You go to a tweeter, LinkedIn, scoop.it, canva, chat with colleagues and an instructor and learn while doing this and write a blog on the experience. I have never hated the process

Learning is not about cramming, learning is all about knowing where and from whom you can get the insight of what you want to do because no matter how much you know if you want to do something you will need to learn about it and get contributions from others, from the network.

When I was doing my research the learning network experience was obvious, my supervisor once asked me "where do we put a full stop" at the end of the sentence, I replied and he asked me again "is this a sentence" referring to the title we were going through, I said no and had to remove it, but that was something we learned at primary level. Again other primary-level knowledge that I experienced was the number alignment on tables, I used it throughout my entire report.

Learning has to be social and from real-life experience, learning has been knowing where to find what whether from your mind, a network of materials and experience that you have come across or from communities and colleagues that you know. Make use of everything you have come across

Have you ever received a call from a classmate asking you to remind him on something you learned or asking a document for it, that guy knows where to find it, that guy learned and that is why we always need to be in touch with a network